Dallas Green, former guitarist for Alexisonfire who went splitsville in less than amicable circumstances over the weekend, has spoken out over his reasons for quitting the band. Green, who ostensibly left to pursue his wildly popular folk rock band City And Colour, says that he’d decided to quit over a year ago, but kept quiet at the urging of his fellow Alexisonfire band mates.

Speaking to Spinner after the Lolapallooza festival over the weekend in Chicago, he says “I wanted to do it 15 months ago. But when I told the guys that I was planning to leave the band when we finished touring at the end of last year, they didn’t want to say anything because they thought it put a lot of pressure on them to come up with a decision right away about what they were going to do. I wanted to announce that I was leaving the band so that people who maybe weren’t going to come to those shows because “I’ve seen Alexis five times, I’ll wait ’til they come through again” would know that it was going to be the last time you’d get to see Alexisonfire as what we were.”

However, Green decided to go along with their wishes, because although he knew what he was going to do, the rest of the band didn’t. “But everyone else wanted to wait, and I respected their wishes, because everyone knew what I was going to do, and obviously they were shocked and didn’t have a gameplan. Then as time went on, it started getting tough because I was doing press for my new record and I had to lie. I felt really weird about lying about it, so I tried to answer it a vague way so that when it did come out it didn’t sound like I was completely lying. But I was.”

As to the circumstances of the split, which front man George Pettit alluded to as being far from amicable, Green says “It’s the truth, right? They didn’t want me to leave the band. They said, “Why can’t you just keep doing what we’re doing, go back and forth?” Well, that’s why I’m leaving, because it’s killing me. As much as they saw me always on tour and always putting records out back to back to back, I don’t think they really understood that I was literally never home.”